


something in me understands the voice of your eyes

by SashaSea (SHCombatalade)



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, Gen, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 10:13:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15705165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SashaSea
Summary: There is an old folk tale, she tells him, of a princess who never smiles. And then she falls in love.





	something in me understands the voice of your eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BurningFairytales](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningFairytales/gifts).



There is an old folk tale, she tells him, of a princess who never smiles.

(“You smile with alarming frequency,” he tells her, distracted; he has no time for folk tales and less for princesses, though he always has time for her. “I am not the princess,” she tells him, smiling.)

The princess is cold and cruel, shaped by the world around her, and she does not smile until she meets a man. A good man, an honest man – nothing like the others she’s familiar with, a single true soul in a sea of thieves and liars (and he does not smile but his eyes crinkle like he might). This good, honest man is the first to bring a smile to the princess’ face, and they fall in love. They live happily ever after, presumably smiling.

He does not understand the point of the story; there is no lesson to be learned from it.

(The lesson is that Kaz did not used to smile.)

* * *

(She gets the tattoo before she sets sail, the crow and cup spilling down the side of her ribs, over her heart.

The cup is a Suli kulhad, and the crow wears a crown.)

* * *

They have been rooming together, when she finds herself ashore, for just over two years now, and working together for over three times as long. In measures of time it is too short, too long – she has trusted him with her life for either one-third or the whole of it, depending on the context of her birth, and he has trusted her only with the first nine years (far more precious to them both). This thing between them – often unspoken, always understated – is something solid and real, something serious and, she has long since come to realize, not nearly as casual as either of them claim.

(She does not say that they are in love, that they are ‘dating’ or ‘going steady’ or whatever the lingo is nowadays. He is Kaz and she is Inej and they are partners or they are important to each other, depending on who they are speaking to, but they are not lovers and they are not in love. She thinks that, maybe, in another lifetime or another line of work, they would be married. They would purchase a house together, adopt a dog or a child or both. Instead they own fifty-seven properties between the two of them and call none of them ‘home,’ lead a crew of pirates and a gang of thieves, and Inej has her daggers and they both have their demons and sometimes they even have a minute alone where they are both in the same city.)

Sometimes they go months without speaking. Sometimes they spend months side by side as different people entirely. Sometimes they kill people, or try to, and sometimes it’s each other. They never claimed to be normal.

(But they’re happy. They do not say that they are in love – maybe in another lifetime, one where they aren’t paid on their ability to lie, but in this one they stitch wounds and dodge bullets and stagger watches and it’s almost the same thing. Stronger even, because their life is a million different ways to kill the other but knowing – and _trusting_ – that they are safe. They do not say I love you because they don’t need to, not in so many words, when they say it every time they turn their back without fear of a knife plunging into it.)

* * *

The first time she kisses him she rouses him from sleep, the slide into wakefulness following the slide of her lips against his forehead; they are in a closet of a hotel room in Shriftport. He does not stir when she approaches, and the display of trust leaves something heavy in her chest, too large and too small and she has been shot but never like this – she is not sure that anyone has ever trusted her like this before.

(Hers is the second watch, and his the second dreamless sleep. She is definitely sure that she has never trusted anyone like this before.)

* * *

When she first realizes it, she has not seen him in five months; not long, but too long, and she feels his absence like a burn at the base of her skull – sharp at times, dull at others, and the sudden awareness of her heartbeat in the darkness. She is no stranger to silence or darkness, an adopted child of both, but for the first time in living memory she finds herself wishing for something to break it.

There was never true silence or darkness in Ketterdam – she found the shadows of the spaces between, ferreted out the quiet whispers, but there were always lights and sounds and the living presence of a city that never truly went dormant. Sometimes, when it all became too much, she retreated to the quiet of the roof and the shadow of the chimney, and she searched the sky for stars she could not see. Other times, she perched on the edge of a desk in an attic office kept as stale and silent as a tomb, as a church, as something both haunted and holy, and kept no company but the crows at the window ledge and the man more suited to the title of Wraith than she.

There is silence and darkness in droves at sea, and she finds that it suits her.

(Other times, she finds it does not.)

Instead, she stands on the deck beneath a brilliant, starry sky and she charts a course for—

_Home_.

The word sears into her brain like a brand, curled tendrils of warmth lurking in the hidden corners of Kaz’s jagged presence; his voice is sharp and his manner sharper, but there are tells in every breath and the spaces in between. He comes to the docks to greet her ship. He comes to the docks at all.

(She never allows herself to think that maybe she cannot have him like this.

She has only recently allowed herself to think that she can have him in the first place.)

* * *

The first time he kisses her it takes them both by surprise.

It has been five years since he bought her a ship to chase a tortured past away to the True Sea; she thinks that, maybe, she is finally ready to stop running.

(Later, they watch a couple stroll hand in hand along the Geldcanal and she tells him the story of a princess.)

* * *

He loses a fight.

(He does not _lose_ , he tells her, he makes a _controlled retreat_. His voice does not break but his bones do, and sometimes she thinks he might forget that he is only human.

She never forgets.)

Only bruises and cracked ribs this time, and they’ve both had worse, but there’s a singular moment where his body crumples and she curses the two stories between them. “You cannot die,” she tells the empty space she’d been ordered not to cross, commanding the words into every shadow she hides in, and there is no response.

(He _can_. That’s the problem.)

More forceful this time, quietly petulant. “I won’t allow it.”

He pulls himself standing with a hidden wince for his bad leg, breathing shallowly around what must be the pain in his chest. His hand moves slowly, like the rest of him, skimming down the side of his torso over the ribs of his left side, but his gaze unerringly finds hers.

He smiles.

* * *

There is an old folk tale, she tells him, of a princess who never smiles. And then she falls in love.

(They do not say I love you – often, they do not say anything at all. She does not trust words and he does not trust the world, and neither of them trusts much of anything or anyone at all. He trusts himself, his mind, his body, and her. She trusts the way the room feels safe even when he is in it.)

* * *

The letter waiting for her in Os Kervo is signed with a tiny, doodled crown.

She smiles.


End file.
